It’s Shocking! Watch This Electric Eel’s Airborne Attack

A. Stout

By A. Stout

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More than 200 years ago, the great German scientist Alexander von Humboldt documented how electric eels in the Amazon leaped out of the water to attack larger animals. However, with no further observations of this behavior, scientists began to grow skeptical of his account, until it was eventually dismissed as a flight of 19th-century scientific imagination.

Catania explains that, while submerged, the water around the eel reduces the effect of its electrical discharge. However, when the eel leaps out of the water to attack a larger animal, more electricity runs through the victim’s body, increasing the effectiveness of the attack and turning the eel into a virtual, predator-deterring electric fence.